Graphic Language: Michael Maslin

In honor of the Cartoon Issue, we asked New Yorker cartoonists to share with us the books that most shaped them as artists. From our colleague Michael Maslin:

Without a doubt, the most influential book for me was James Thurber’s “Thurber Carnival”—the book became my Bible.

Early on, though, before I found Thurber, there was a handful of other books that made life interesting. The “Dick and Jane” primers were the first books I ever read. The words, though often exciting (“‘Help, Sally, help!’ said Dick.”), were the least appealing part: I was sucked in by the illustrations, by the world they created. Florida’s Norton Museum of Art called it “a strangely homogeneous world where night never came, knees never got scraped, parents never yelled and everything was fun.” It was exactly the kind of place that a kid in a picket-fence-less Jersey town wanted to inhabit. I loved spending as much time as I could with Dick, Jane, Spot, and Puff. They showed me it was possible, with some ink and paper, to make up whatever world you wanted.

Not long after I began reading, I got hooked on comic books, especially “Batman.” To this day, one issue in particular stands out: the first “Giant Batman Annual,” published in 1961, which featured the story “The Strange Costumes of Batman.” Batman and Robin, hanging out in the Bat Cave, browse through a rack of costumes, pulling out an all-white bat costume and one of “all gold cloth”—and then there was the “luminous” glow-in-the-dark green bat costume that, according to Robin, “scared a superstitious crook into submission!” It was a real eye-opener that Batman could break out of his sartorial mold.

Later, John Lennon’s first book, “In His Own Write,” was my introduction to crazy wacky humor. (“The Fat Growth on Eric Hearble,” for instance.) Lennon, with a little help from Thurber and “Alice in Wonderland,” imagined Dick and Jane’s world in a most unusual way.

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